Monthly Archives: September 2004

Something in my thoughts right now returns to magical sparkling fairy filled nights on Franklin Ave., Los Angeles, 2001. Gloriously long happy summer before the world became a place everyone thinks is filled with danger. In those waning days of the old regime, I was attached at the hip to Mark: Apostle or easy target the clown fucker is still to find out. Our city through the lens of Franklin Ave. was mysterious and dazzling: fitness freaks jogging at midnight past midgets walking Great Danes around the Scientology Celebrity Center as we walked from street parking on a highway overpass, lights streaking in the night. Somehow through the thinning smog, all was radiant. Franklin Ave., Francesca Lia Block’s LA. Foothills turned outward, caves of strange fulfillments and tendencies. Constant pints and parades of beautiful women, all out of the reach of my thickening (reference the pints) self, things come and gone faceless like the transience of our emotions then, single and strange and almost Invisible, dark amongst the flickering neon. Mark was always watching, the novelist he is, and I was always trying to either insert or extricate myself from the strangest circumstances I could find – from the petite and obvious therapist to autistic children before, to the neurotic Bryn Mawr girl whose intentions and methods were absolutely incomprehensible after. In the middle were two boys playing with the newly found toy: legal drinking age, in the most obscure scenes to be found in this where even the commute to work was a matter of significance: 101 to Gower if I could, 10 to La Brea if I couldn’t, Venice to Crenshaw to Wilshire to Highland if even that was impassible. It had meaning. Significance is what I was seeking here in the middle of all this. And somehow, just peeking through, there it was, undeniable yet unidentifiable. La Poubelle had the best Guinness we had found, and we tried to drink them dry while others orbited, not yet did we know whether they would reach escape velocity or crash back in a blaze of humanity to less forgiving terrains. Even if we had kept track, those orbits are still too slow to discern their fate, and I feel something akin now, more than three years later to that same indeterminacy watching everything play out like quantum ballet: the smallest events, the most dramatic significances. There was something there no to be named but understood that these words only do the merest justice to.

I’ve got the Baltimore / Pittsburg game on while I clean. Usually I sorta like the Ravens, even though they’re the Bengals biggest competetion in the AFC North (aka the bush league of pro football) ’cause I’ve always been a huge fan of the old Baltimore Defensive Coordinator Marvin Lewis – now the Bengals head coach, and of the Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, the best defender in the league and its most passionate player. But Ben Roethlisberger – fresh outta Miami (yes, the real Miami, not that fool ass Florida school) just came in for the injured Steelers starting QB. He’s getting his shot, and I hope he can make a mark. So now I’m rooting for Pittsburg in this game.

Roethlisberger just threw a touchdown! Congrats Big Ben, I hope you are one of the best someday. Go Steelers – for today.

any other suggestions? I hate activism and religion, so those are out, a zine would be cool, but I’m a little old for that; my camera’s on loan, and I don’t have a darkroom, the house needs organized, but that’s not that creative – I’ll probably do that anyway. Let me know if you’ve got any ideas.

I’m only half way through, but Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma is amazing.

And under the Urban Exploration folder, I spent two days last week taking measurements on this creepy old housing complex.

It’s amazing the difference good housekeeping makes when everyone’s moved out and a place has stood vacant for a year. In the well kept units, it looked like they had just moved out yesterday, the only difference being the stale air – but in the bad ones, it was hellish, the smell of poverty (dust, bacon grease, rotting food, and moldy carpet) gets lodged in your lungs and won’t come out.

Wish I could share the pictures with people, but this was for work, and I’ve got confidentiality agreements and such… I even went far enough to delete the name of the neighborhood in this post, just to not reveal too much. Maybe a little neurotic, but I don’t wanna fuck up at work.

Yeah, the place was hella creepy, especially the basement unit we didn’t expect to be there that wasn’t cleared out at all, making me think (probably incorrectly) that we had a squatter. The basement (with no windows – except the boarded up ones in the apt down there) was super creepy, until I realized we were idiots and found the light switch. And there was a unit that burned out – I figure that’s why the place was vacated.

Then after having been in every unit of the place, I found out through google that an old lady had been found murderered in her apartment their a couple years ago. Cue return of the previously banished heebie jeebies.